Design environment for the support of configurable Network Interfaces in NoC-based platforms

Abstract

IP-based platforms with Network on Chip (NoC)are one solution to support complex telecommunication applications. In this context, NoC architectures targeting high throughput applications tend to have configurable Network Interfaces (NI) and routers for reuse and performance purposes and aims at providing advanced communication and computation services. Unfortunately, these Network Interfaces are increasingly complex to parameterize and to program, while the deployment tools taking into account the low level architectural details are still non existent.This work focuses on providing methods and tools to easily and efficiently deploy applications on IP and NoC based platform with configurable NI. Configurable NI offer primitives to synchronize and schedule the communication and the behaviour of IPs. Our code generation flow takes as inputs an abstract model of the HW platform, of the application and of the mapping, and generates most of the required configurations.The efficiency of the approach is illustrated by the deployment of a complex 4G telecommunication application on a heterogeneous IP-based platform. I.978-1-4244-7938-2/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

Configurable network-on-chip router macrocells

“…The router can support several topologies [2], [3], [4], [24], [27], [28], [29], [30] such as Ring, Octagon, Spidergon, 2D mesh plus a family of customized topologies that can be derived from them. Each topology has some advantages and disadvantages, briefly reviewed hereafter.…”

“…The rationale of this choice is to streamline the generation of those design aspects that are repeatable, structured and prone to errors, while retaining the full advantages of manually coding RTL blocks, like the ability of achieving timing closure with extremely tight constraints. Using the terminology of the new IP-XACT standard [23], [24], i.e. the XML format used to package reusable IP cores, the subject of this work should be referred to as a 'code generator', i.e.…”